Occasionally, you may want or need to provide links to external content from your project website. Several projects do this today: it's an excellent way to provide more information for your project, help to make your project become part of the community, and even point to alternative distributions of your code. Some projects link to websites that showcase how the project's code is being used by the community, some to FAQs and other sources of information.

Offsite Branding and Behaviour

The content on the Eclipse website and wiki is subject to the Eclipse Terms of Use. Information, downloads, and other kinds of information found on other websites are likely subject to different terms of use. In consideration of this, it is critical that your project's consumers are made explicitly aware of where the Eclipse project's website ends and the third-party site begins.

There is some adequate disclaimers that make it clear that although this is a "related link" that this is not Eclipse content.

The link to the existing code is not just be a direct link to content. It has to be a link to a download page on the external site.

The link to their download page needs to be such that it brings up an entirely new browser so that it is made even more apparent to the user that they are leaving the eclipse.org website.

External Downloads

It is generally acceptable to provide links to alternative downloads for your project on project pages. You might do this, to--for example--provide the user with access to a more complete download that contains content that cannot be distributed from an eclipse.org site (CDT project downloads might include links to distributions that contain a compiler and debugger, for example).

Eclipse-based downloads must always be presented as the primary solution and external downloads presented as alternatives.

Downloads that can be hosted at eclipse.org should be hosted at eclipse.org. If your company wants to provide a download mirror, see the Webmaster FAQ.

Vendor-Neutrality

You must take care to ensure that external links are presented in a vendor-neutral manner. Vendor neutrality is a key ingredient for operating in an open manner. Vendor interests can be represented in the project downloads, but users must be able to find vendor-neutral options. The best way to do this is to always have an eclipse.org-based download as your project's primary option.

A project that opts to host vendor-specific links to content must have a policy (formal or informal) that permits other vendors to participate. In general, if a vendor logo appears on a project's Project Summary page as a supporting organization, that vendor should reasonably be able to include links to their project-related content.